Britons are no greedier now than in the past, so why are we piling on the
pounds – and what can we do about it?

On April 2 1806 an intriguing advertisement was placed in The Times newspaper. It described a Mr Daniel Lambert, “the greatest Curiosity in the World who at the age of 36 weighs upwards of FIFTY STONE.” Mr Lambert, it went on, “will see Company at his House, No 53 Piccadilly, opposite St James’s Church — Admittance 1s.”

Originally from Leicester and a well respected breeder of sporting animals, Lambert had in his youth been fit and strong, fighting a bear in the streets of the town on one occasion. By all accounts it was only when he succeeded his father in the relatively sedentary job of keeper at Leicester City gaol, that he dramatically gained weight.

He died at the age of 39, probably from an artery blockage – but not before having made a fortune from taking up residence in London and exhibiting himself, becoming, according to the Leicester Mercury in 2009, “one of the city’s most cherished icons”.

Whether Lambert would attract the same attention today is doubtful. Two hundred years on, according to a report last year, there are in Britain a staggering 100,000 Lamberts: the “super-obese”, with a body mass index of 50 or more, in need of triple width aircraft seats and wardrobe sized coffins.

That figure, though, is just the tip of the iceberg. As all the research shows, we Brits are fatter and heavier than ever before in history, with one in four of us now classified as obese (a BMI between 30 and 40) - a figure which has more than doubled in the last quarter of a century - while a further third are overweight (a BMI between 25 and 29).

It’s not only our BMIs that are on a dangerous upward curve. Waistlines are expanding too, especially as we get older, when metabolic rate slows and body fat accumulates. Recent figures show that 30 per cent of men and 55 per cent of women aged 60 to 70 having a waist size of 102cm/40 inches and 88cm/34.5 inches respectively.

Corpulence has always been with us of course, although in former times it was associated with the rich. The lower classes, fed mostly on bread and jam with maybe a few scraps of meat on Sundays, tended to be weak and scrawny - as was noted with some alarm by officials sizing up recruits for the Boer War, in the first systematic measurements of height and weight ever undertaken.

These days, obesity is unequivocally linked to poverty, while the rich - especially rich women – tend to keep thin. Looking around the Telegraph offices, one wouldn’t be aware of any obesity “epidemic” and the same would be true of any gathering of the educated, metropolitan elite. That said, the middle classes shouldn’t get too complacent – figures from the government’s National Obesity Forum show that weight problems are increasing at all levels of society – and with them, an increased risk of chronic, life-threatening conditions such as heart disease and diabetes.

How did we get so fat? The answer is simple: we consume more energy (measured in kcals) than we expend. In other words, we eat too much and move too little. Many experts now hold that this is not our fault and that we are no more gluttonous or slothful than our predecessors. The theory is that when it comes to appetite, we are at the mercy of evolution and the “thrifty gene”, which has primed us to eat whenever food is available.

“In the past, the person with the feeble appetite would be the one that died in winter,” says Ursula Arens, a dietitian who has written extensively on nutrition. “Everyone alive today is a survivor thanks to having fat, greedy ancestors. This is why we can’t endlessly tell people to eat less - they come up against their own brains and bodies telling them to eat at all times food is available.”

And today, in contrast to the distant past, food is constantly available, plentiful and (notwithstanding today’s rising prices) cheap. It was at the end of World War Two that the government, determined that the spectre of hunger which had haunted both world wars was never again an issue, launched what was pretty much an agricultural revolution to maximise yields, encouraging farmers with guaranteed subsidies and markets.

“One hundred years ago, food was phenomenally expensive – up to 70 per cent of the average income,” says Arens. “As a result of government policy and for the first time in history, it has been falling since the 1950s and is now cheaper than it’s ever been – about 10 per cent of average earnings (excluding alcohol).”

The entry of women into the workplace followed, radically changing the kind of food we ate: with wives unable to go to the market every day and coming home at the same time as their husbands, meals had to be easy, convenient and with a long shelf life. Hence the popularity of baked beans, fish fingers, tinned mandarins and Angel Delight. Increasingly, manufacturers added fat and sugar to this highly processed food, to make it palatable.

Yet surely our grandparents were also fond of their fat and sugar, in the form of syrup puddings and spotted dick, not to mention the fatty meat and mounds of bread and dripping people ate (aside from wartime)? Arens points out that in the past, with men going to the fields or the factory and women doing their own laundry and housework, they needed the calories. And whatever people ate, they followed a pretty strict regime of three meals a day, with little in between.

“If you look at food diaries of the 1950s, food was plainer, the portions were moderate and there were still a lot of vegetables - turnips, swedes, carrots - used in stews. If you were hungry in between meals you ate an apple or a slice of bread. Chocolate was reserved for special occasions.”

Today, with food available 24/7, we snack and graze at will on calorie-dense smoothies and soft drinks, savouries, pastries and triple-choc-chip biscuits. The trend, associated with weight gain, is especially common among the young, with UK consumers between six and 24 being the biggest snackers in Europe.

And some snacks are bigger than others. “When I was a girl and we went to the seaside I’d take a sandwich in a Tupperware box,” says Dr Susan Jebb OBE, professor of diet and population health at the University of Oxford. “Now you can get a three course meal in a petrol station.”

Increasing choice (the latest kick being tabasco-flavoured chocolate) means we are ever more food-obsessed and never bored enough to stop eating. A typical dinner of 50 years ago - lamb chops say, with boiled potatoes – was pretty untitillating; now we have Indian, Chinese, Mexican, Thai to choose from – an abundance of stimulation that leads us to overconsume.

“If you had to eat the same food over and over, you would lose weight very quickly,” says Professor Jimmy Bell, from the MRC Clinical Sciences Research Centre in Hammersmith. Increased plate, cup and portion sizes – especially of ready meals - are another factor: research by the British Heart Foundation found that in the last 20 years, individual chicken pies grew in size by 40 per cent and curry meals by 50 per cent.

“When I was young a bag of crisps weighed 25g,” says Prof Jebb. “Now it’s 40-50 grams – and no one saves half a bag of crisps for the next day.”

Alcohol may also be contributing to our weight problems – and not just in the form of the classic (male) beer belly. Women in particular have been drinking more over the past 30 years and they tend to favour wine, yet there’s evidence that even a small amount of alcohol before or with a meal will mean we eat more. And few people realise alcohol has an energy value of 7kcal per gram – second only to fat (9kcal/g) in energy density.

Then there are the food companies’ ingenious marketing strategies – the meal deals, the three-for-two offers, the carefully thought out packaging and positioning, all designed to trick us - or rather our brains - into believing we want more.

Prof Paul Fletcher, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, says that certain “reward centres“ in the brain light up not just when we eat our favourite food but when we see images associated with it – hence the power of certain symbols like the McDonald's yellow arches. “It’s a bit like what happens when a former drug addict passes a house where he used to score. He will have a sudden intense desire to do so again as the brain is stimulated.”

Why can’t we just exert some willpower and consume less? It’s not so easy, according to Prof Jebb, scientific adviser to the government on nutrition and co-author of the influential Foresight report on Obesity published in 2007. “The amount of time food has been plentiful has been the blink of an eye – we haven’t had a chance to evolve to catch up,” she explains. "Our biology is not well developed for the modern world.”

In particular, she says, “there is an asymmetry between our powerful biological drive to eat and a weak appetite control system, in which signals of fullness are weak. “ Which is why in restaurants it’s hard to resist the dessert even when we are comfortably full.

“We have got locked into this and it is a vicious cycle. The more you eat, the heavier you become and the more food you need to sustain your weight because your metabolic rate goes up (it’s a myth that overweight people have a lower metabolic rate)."

To lose excess weight, we would have to exert “very powerful cognitive control” and tolerate feeling hungry, says Prof Jebb.

Oddly, surveys appear to show that we eat dramatically fewer calories than people did in the past (excluding the two world wars): one recent report found a 20 per cent drop in calorie intake over the last 30 years. But the data isn’t considered that reliable: most food surveys, relying on self-reporting, are thought to underestimate what people actually eat by about 25 per cent.

In any case, even if we are eating less, we’re still getting fatter – because our physical activity levels have plummeted even further. Car ownership, the loss of manual work, technology taking over household chores and “screen time” at home have all contributed to our increasingly sedentary lifestyles. The loss of school playing fields – with some 10,000 being sold off between 1979 and 1997 and a further two a month since the 2012 Olympics – are held by many to be another cause of obesity in children.

“Our grandparents may have had a higher calorie intake than we do but they walked miles to the shops, did the laundry by hand and mostly had physical jobs like farming or labouring so they needed the calories.” says Arens. ”You don’t need them if you’re going to sit in a call centre all day.”

“Physical activity was not a choice – but part of life.”

By contrast, the latest research examining the lifestyles of a million adults in England, funded by the Economic and Social Research council, found that nearly 80 per cent of the population is failing to hit key government targets (150 minutes of moderate exercise weekly). And nearly one in ten adults does not even walk continuously for even five minutes a day.

As with food, the forces ranged against us are similarly strong when it comes to (voluntary) exercise. “We all know the message – we can and should go to the gym or whatever every night, but many people feel they have neither time nor energy.” Exercise has to compete against all the other options for our limited leisure time: the choice between an evening at the gym and a film with a friend is frankly a no-brainer.

Then there’s the seductive power of Facebook, Twitter, TV – all sedentary activities, with watching TV in particular linked to snacking, according to a recent review by Loughborough University experts.

The result, says Prof Jebb, is that on average we consume 25 calories a day more than we expend in activity. It’s not a lot, but enough, as it accumulates over the years, to make us fat. “It’s not rampant gluttony but a minor error in our homeostatic balance that is the problem,” she adds.

Clearly individual genes play some part in explaining why some people are more inclined to put on weight, in the same environment. “We’ve so far discovered about ten gene mutations which make it likely that someone will put on weight and we think there are many others that contribute,“ says Professor Sadaf Farooqi, from the MRC-Wellcome Trust Institute of Metabolic Science in Cambridge. But this doesn’t explain why at a population level, Britons are getting heavier, she concedes.

It’s not all bad news. The latest child measurement figures show that obesity levels in primary school are levelling off compared to the previous year (from 9.5 per cent to 9.3 per cent in 4 to 5-year-olds and from 19.2 per cent to 18.9 per cent in 10 to 11-year-olds), possibly because of improvements in school food standards and the drive for more sports (60 active minutes a day as a minimum). The food companies are being “nudged” into bringing down levels of sugar and fat (as well as salt) in their products. And over the past decade levels of physical activity have increased, with 14 per cent of adults in the UK now playing sport regularly, higher than the EU average of 9 per cent.

What else needs to be done? Ban cars once a week so that people walk more? Teach children how to cook proper food? Provide more sports facilities at the workplace and more time to use them? Work on making all neighbourhoods safe to walk? Replace junk food outlets in deprived areas?

The Foresight report says our “obesity “epidemic” can be compared to climate change, arguing that action at all levels is needed. The problem, it says, has been at least three decades in the making – and will probably take just as long to reverse.